Napoleon's Glance: The Secret of Strategy

by William Duggan

Overview

In Napoleon's Glance William Duggan discovers the secret of Napoleon's success — coup d'oeil (pronounced koo-DOY) meaning a stroke of the eye, or "glance": a sudden insight that shows you what course of action to take. It comes from knowledge of the past: You draw on what worked in other situations, in a new combination that fits the problem at hand. Napoleon's Glance — probably the first book to link Napoleon's victories to Picasso's development as an artist! — tells how 10 great strategists owed their success to coup d'oeil. All 10 applied it with great effort and risk and no guarantee it would work. But in case after case, we find the same story: How American women won the vote. How General Patton became the most successful Allied general on the Western Front of World War II. How Joan of Arc saved France from certain conquest by England. How in one generation Japan went from a peasant backwater to an industrial giant. How Picasso became the leading artist of the twentieth century. Though there have been scores of books written about Napoleon, this is the first popular book written for the general reader about his military strategy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781560256021
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	03/19/2004
Series:	Nation Books
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

William Duggan teaches strategy at Columbia Business School. He has twenty years of experience as a strategy advisor and consultant. He is also cofounder of Creative Strategy group, which helps organizations and individuals apply the art of Napoleon's strategies to whatever they do.

Table of Contents

1.   In Search of Strategy

2.   Napoleon vs. the Nobles

3.   Picasso Finds His Style

4.   A Bolt from the Blue:  St. Paul on the Road to Damascus

5.   The Lion King of Old Mali

6.   Miss Baker and Civil Rights

7.   Alice Paul Wins Votes for Women

8.   Strategy Reborn:  Patton vs. the Planners

9.   The Barefoot Bank of Bangladesh

10.  Samurai Strategy:  The Meiji Revolution of Japan

11.  Joan of Arc Saves France

12.  Conclusion:  A Lesson of History

Editorial Reviews

Pop business meets military and intellectual history in this intriguing study of strategizing as a habit of being. Look for red hats in a crowd, writes former Ford Foundation executive and Columbia Business School visiting professor Duggan, and you’ll almost certainly find them. That "confirmation bias" poses a danger for anyone reading the historical record to look for patterns--but, he gamely remarks, it also shows, at the very least, "that red hats exist." The red hat here is Duggan’s overarching notion of Napoleon’s famed coup d’oeil--the telling glance, or, as the German strategist von Clausewitz defined it, "the rapid discovery of a truth which to the ordinary mind is not visible at all or only becomes so after long examination and reflection." For Napoleon, the key to success was to study in close detail and replay battles of the past, looking for the critical moment at which the certainty of victory became apparent and seeking to re-create that moment in the present; his theorizing yielded the doctrine, studied by military officers ever since, that the successful leader will, in the words of former NATO commander Wesley Clark, "bring the enemy to battle at the time and place of your choosing, where you had the advantage and could finish him." By Duggan’s account, not only generals benefit from that coup d’oeil: Pablo Picasso had the knack, and it enabled him to maneuver his talents onto ground carefully prepared by the likes of Henri Matisse, just as Martin Luther King Jr. was able to read the scent of change on the wind and, with the aid of many an unsung lieutenant, move the civil-rights struggle to more favorable ground. Duggan sometimes stretches the facts a bit to suit histhesis, but with no harm done, and he turns up plenty of fruitful case studies--including a few pleasant surprises, such as his inventive reading of a medieval African epic and his revisionist take on the publican Saul’s self-reinvention as the disciple Paul on the road to Damascus. More literate and convincing than most of its kind: a good candidate for business-minded readers seeking something for airplane or nightstand.

Kirkus Reviews